Nowadays, instant support can make a huge difference when it comes to the performance of your eCommerce store. Customers don’t like delays, so getting to their queries as soon as possible is important.
A quick and efficient eCommerce experience is crucial for delivering the best possible customer service experience for your customers.
Customer experience is a customer’s perception of the way a company treats and deals with them. And in an online environment, where it is not easy to build brand loyalty, eCommerce live chat software can make all the difference.
eCommerce chat software is changing the way people shop online. It can give your store a competitive advantage and make customers feel valued and important by opening up different lanes of communication.
While it’s challenging to compete with the eCommerce giants on price and convenience, a superior customer service level may be the edge that your store needs to get your foot in the market, making it vital to invest in chat for eCommerce purposes. In fact, a study carried out by Walker Information found that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator in the not too distant future. So, why not get ahead of the trend now?
This blog post will take a look at what you should look out for when choosing eCommerce live chat software and a live chat service provider, as well as some of the key benefits of live chat for eCommerce sales.
Finding the right eCommerce live chat for your business
While it might be tempting to pick up the first eCommerce live chat you see and begin integrating it into your business, picking the right service isn’t so simple.
There are plenty of factors you’ll want to take into account before making your decision, including the following:
How customizable is your online shopping live chat?
One of the first things to look for in an outsourced live chat provider & live chat software for eCommerce is how much control you have to adapt the live chat window and settings to suit your business and website.
For example, with the Moneypenny live chat service, you can customize the live chat window’s appearance to align with your brand. You can also customize greetings in many ways. The live chat window can proactively display different greetings, depending on which webpage a user is on.
Moneypenny live chat also allows users to tag conversations quickly so that a sales query goes straight to a member of the sales team, or a support query goes to a relevant member of the support team.
Being proactive is one of the key benefits of live chat for eCommerce, and can help you to grow your business, gain loyal customers, and gain valuable feedback, all through casual adjustments to your site design.
Using chat for eCommerce as an overflow service
An overflow service can be invaluable if you have seasonal products for sale. For example, if you sell surfboards or summer shorts, your sales are likely to peak just before the summer.
Rather than recruit additional seasonal live chat agents to handle the peak times of the year, you can use a live chat provider with an overflow service to handle all of the inquiries you get that your full-time team is unable to deal with.
If you are a solopreneur or a small business, an overflow service can be ideal too.
For example, as a business owner, you may want to handle live chats yourself, but what happens when you need to log yourself out to deal with a customer, or when your website receives lots of interested visitors thanks to a successful marketing campaign?
Live chat agents can spring into action with an overflow service, as soon as you log yourself out or as soon as all of your in-house live chat agents are busy. With an overflow service, you can instantly scale the number of live chats in line with the number of live chat inquiries you have.
However, not every online shopping chat provides this, so you need to be sure that any provider you’re interested in has this overflow capability built into their live chat.
Finding a live chat for eCommerce websites with 24/7 cover
One of the great things about the internet, in general, is that you can access it 24/7. In an age of shift workers and night owls, providing customer assistance around the clock can make a huge difference to the number of customers your website generates.
We can handle live chat at all times, meaning you have the potential to catch all customer inquiries and never miss an important sale.
Not only this, but you can increase customer engagement, build rapport and provide an excellent customer service level, regardless of the time.
And while it’s fantastic to have a 24/7 managed live chat service, one of the other great benefits of live chat for eCommerce is the knowledge that, should anything go wrong, your live chat provider has you covered at any time of the day or night.
A 24/7 service is a basic ingredient of any live chat for an eCommerce website, so avoid provides that don’t offer this benefit.
Making use of integrated AI
With many online shopping live chats, such as the Moneypenny live chat, you have the option of using programmable chatbots to auto-respond to specific, frequently asked questions.
Once you’ve built up a database of the common questions, using the live chat portal’s reports, you can use this method to handle a large percentage of online queries, and focus your full attention on more complex queries.
And when the bot’s response does not satisfy or answer the query, a live chat agent will be on hand to further assist the user regardless of their query.
Reducing shopping cart drop out
One of the most critical roles of live chat for eCommerce websites is to reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment – the number of people who start the checkout process but never complete it.
Digital marketing website – Wordstream.com, describes shopping cart abandonment as “the single largest obstacle for eCommerce retailers to overcome.”
Our data appears to support this statement – depending on the industry, the eCommerce checkout abandonment rate varies from 50% to 85%, according to this SaleCycle report. That’s a lot of potential customers to lose and a lot of revenue lost.
People who do this, sometimes subconsciously, want to know things such as:
- Is there a discount?
- Do I need to create an account?
- What is the shipping fee?
- Is there a return issue?
- Are there reviews for this product?
- What payment methods can I use?
There are many other reasons users drop out just before making a purchase – perhaps the site is too slow or not optimized for mobile phone users.
With this in mind, a great place to add your live chat widget is during the checkout process to answer any questions they might have.
The benefits of a live chat for eCommerce with Moneypenny
A dedicated agent can be one of the main benefits of live chat for eCommerce. Anyone who takes a free trial with Moneypenny’s live chat service has a welcome call with their primary live chat agent.
During this call, you can tell us exactly how you and your team would like us to work. The call also gives the agent time to get to know the basics of your business, the industry, and the brand, so that he or she can handle live chats appropriately.
Without the hassle of recruitment and legal paperwork, you get all the benefits of a full-time, in-house live chat agent at a fraction of the cost.
We’re also based directly in the US, meaning you don’t have to worry about your
- Is there a discount?
- Do I need to create an account?
- What is the shipping fee?
- Is there a return issue?
- Are there reviews for this product?
- What payment methods can I use?
being located in another country. Our fully customizable live chat, with specialized live chat agents, is compliant with all US data legislation and provides many insightful reports inside the client portal.
With no long-term contracts and a free trial currently available, you have nothing to lose by trying Moneypenny’s free,
- Is there a discount?
- Do I need to create an account?
- What is the shipping fee?
- Is there a return issue?
- Are there reviews for this product?
- What payment methods can I use?
Get in touch today to see how our team can help you with our
- Is there a discount?
- Do I need to create an account?
- What is the shipping fee?
- Is there a return issue?
- Are there reviews for this product?
- What payment methods can I use?
or head over to the
- Is there a discount?
- Do I need to create an account?
- What is the shipping fee?
- Is there a return issue?
- Are there reviews for this product?
- What payment methods can I use?
for more pieces like this one.
